Glad to see that this LiveJournal continues to shape opinion, as Simple Minds have clearly been reading it lately: they've just finished a tour of gigs based solely upon their first five albums, and a boxed set of same to accompany.

Bit late to post this, sorry, but you can still catch them at T in the Park this summer…

How exciting: I just got a comment from pingback_bot, on this post. I had not been aware of the existence of such a bot before, but it seems a good idea. Explanation here.

(Well, it was exciting to me. But I dare say some of you have known about it for years, and had thousands such comments?)

I wait with slight terror to find out which of you are going to be getting heavily into these.

Desperation or genius on LJ's part? You decide.

Edited to add: I should have had a sweepstake on who would be the first to crack and sign up.
Impulsiveness, thy name is kauket...
(Yes, the games page helpfully tells you which of your friends have signed up for stuff.)

Interesting post re economic gubbins from catharticmoment, who has just joined LJ and is known to many of you from the glory days of Hezbollah and the like. (Drop me a line if you feel you should know them but can't work out who they are.)

Almost certainly, more than mine:

This thing from Microsoft claims to predict demographics based on search terms used and urls visited. It reckons for example that if you're reading this journal you're 51% likely to be male and 47% likely to be 24 or under, whereas for LiveJournal as a whole the figures are 54% and 49% respectively, and for venta* it's 50% and 45%. It also throws up different results for individual posts, althoug some return no result.

No clue as to where their base data comes from, maybe from evil monitoring within people's Internet Explorers?

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* (Picked purely at random as I happened to have her journal open at the time.)

This is quite interesting I think:

http://www.unifr.ch/physics/mm/work/lj/find_friends.php?name=undyingking&sort_type=on

It's like my FriendFinder only it uses a PageRank-like algorithm to weight 'votes' for suggested friends. It throws up a weird artefact right near the top, with the mysterious annedick hideously overpowered thanks I guess to being one of only two friends of Thomas Disch.

Thanks to the esteemed jiggery_pokery for linking to this great story about the far-sighted Chinese government's endeavours to stop people spending too long playing online games: "After three hours, the number of in-game "experience points" for, say, killing an opponent are reduced by half. After five hours you do not get any at all. It is called the fatigue system." Although I guess in what we laughingly refer to as the free world there would be strong feelings against the implementation of such a system (otherwise known as "gradually sucking all the joy out of it"), I could see a similar sort of thing on consoles being pretty popular with parents.

On a completely unrelated note, who has the oldest LiveJournal? I know some of you lot have been on here for yonks, but how many yonks? -- when was your first entry? And has your journal worked out the way you were expecting back then?

Excellent, this seems to be OK now. Lots of thanks to wimble, no thanks to chrisvenus ;-)

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Get your own tag cloud from the UKG TagClouder!

I've been getting a load of server timeouts on LJ in recent days -- anyone else on a free account seeing the same thing? People on paid accounts, are you seeing a rise in your "I've leapt onto the server ahead of X number of freeloaders" stats lately?